Year of construction: 1996
Cost: Bought for £70 (ebay)
Key Features: Knob controls, it's blue... Sounds are fun.
It was Christmas day and a large unopened package from my brothers lay under the tree. I discovered it wasn't a really big super soaker, as I had initially contemplated, the relief was probably visible. No, under the festive paper wrapping was a large, long brown box, sealed with gaffa and giving off that definitive ebay smell. My brothers had done me the greatest service this Christmas; finding and buying me an old synth on ebay, saving me the nail biting bidding and irritating dealing with sellers and paypal.
It was a Yamaha CS1x from 1996. It's a sort of Mondeo blue, or the colour I imagine Mondeos to be. 6 rotary knobs control ASDR (well, AR anyway), Cutoff, Resonance and two are assignable. You can get a really wide range of sounds, so if you're into flitting about from genre to genre and having fun with music, then this is a really good buy. It even has some basic effects like reverb, and with basic LFO you can get creative with some more interesting effects. I should probably talk about the performance vs multi mode, and the editing of patches and... oh just read the SOS review. It has an arpeggiator, and that makes me smile.
Apparently, it was Yamaha's first attempt at a digital emulation of an analog synthesiser. I'm not sure I believe that, or if it's true, then it's quite a mad attempt. I mean that in a good way, it feels confused, unsure of itself, like a youngster synth making it's way into the world and desperately seeking it's place. Its a weird and great middle ground between trying to produce emulations of real instruments, very electronic sounds, sampled sounds and even drum machines. It of course, fails in each case, but as Bright Eyes said "Failures always sounded better".
It's got a good keyboard too.
M
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